The present invention relates to data processing by digital computer, and more particularly to Environment, Health and Safety (EH&S) systems.
In EH&S systems, for example, the EH&S system of SAP R/3, available from SAP AG of Walldorf, Germany, users can use one or more databases that include data describing various products used in the productions of life science and healthcare products. Such data will be referred to in the present specification as product data. Product data can include, for example, regulations and laws concerning the products and it ingredients. Product data can specify the legal requirements for the use of certain products, including, for example, handling requirements, storage requirements, and transport requirements. Product data can further include, for example, United Nations (UN) list substances and classification, physical and chemical characteristics of products, safety information for products, and hazardous material management data for products. Additional restrictions and information for certain products can be included.
An enterprise that uses EH&S products, for example, hazardous materials, typically need updated product data to ensure not only the safe use of the product but also compliance with the governing regulations. The enterprise will typically obtain product data from content providers, which include companies providing product data for EH&S products. The content providers usually send the product data to the enterprise through customized interfaces because the content providers usually store the product data in a data format that can differ from the data format supported by the EH&S system of the enterprise. The enterprise typically imports product data from various content providers into their databases. To allow data import from various content providers, various customized data interfaces are needed.
These interfaces can be hardware or software implemented. The interfaces provide communication between the EH&S middleware and the content providers. The interface needs to support each data format of the imported product data. Mapping of data from a content provider into the database format needs to be programmed for each respective data format. The mapping can require, for instance, assigning external product identifications (IDs) from content providers to internal product IDs of the database. Further, IDs of properties, characteristics, identifiers and/or phrases for products needs to be mapped from external to internal.
When receiving data from various content providers, a user (usually an employee of the enterprise) does not know which data is available and which data is to be include into the enterprise's EH&S system. The user needs to select from the available data and specify which of the product data available from the content provider to retrieve and map into the database. However, with different data formats for different content providers, a user interface enabling to select data is difficult to implement. The technical problem lies in the various data formats for product data.
Supporting various content providers also results in a high programming load. The technical problem of supporting various data formats of various content providers lies in the requirement of mapping programs for each data format. A further technical problem lies in the programming load to support changes in the data format of content providers. Another technical problem lies in the fact, that supporting various data formats is error prone.